51. No Salvation without Substitution
No Salvation without Substitution
There must be substitution, or there can be no salvation! Any man who rejects the doctrine of salvation through substitution says good-bye to his reason, shuts his eyes to self-evident truth, and puts salvation beneath his feet! The authority for that statement? It does not lie in the blind dogmatism of speculative philosophy, nor in the rationalizing of human scholarship, but in that divine philosophy and infinite wisdom which come into the inquiring and honest heart over the pathway of intuitive, axiomatic, self-evidencing truth, that pathway being opened by humble faith alone. And let it be said with all possible emphasis that if we have missed our way in our thinking, and have arrived at unsound or misleading conclusions—that is, if substitution is not the method of salvation, then it ought easily to be possible for some one to set before us a method of salvation so absolutely axiomatic and overwhelmingly self-evidencing as to prove the doctrine of substitution to be wholly unreasonable, and therefore false and impossible, and thus push it forever beyond further serious human consideration. If you who are reading these lines refuse this doctrine, it should be because you have a more perfect doctrine to present, backed both by Scripture and reason, and the way is wide open and the call loud for you to present it. But the doctrine of substitution is so utterly self-evident to all who are first willing to believe it, that they rest upon it with the utmost confidence of which they are capable, in the certainty that no one will ever be able to set before the world a doctrine that can take its place. For there is no need of God, angels or men that it does not meet, and no problem of complete and eternal salvation which it does not solve. If salvation is not by substitution, there is no such thing as salvation.
God’s mercy thus forever stands on the impregnable rock of His inflexible justice. It is first mentioned in Scripture in that connection, and can never be separated from it, for their union is in Christ as the mercy of God incarnate, because in Him is His justice incarnate. When God came down to save Lot and his loved ones from the doom of Sodom, it was because “the Lord, being merciful unto him,” anticipated the day when His mercy would be personified in His Son. And so as Lot was saved for the Son’s sake, so Zoar was saved for Lot’s sake (Genesis 19:16-22), and substitution is thus written into the very heart of God’s mercy.
Again, when Moses came down from Sinai with the tables of the Law and found Israel worshiping a calf of gold, he broke the tables in wrath against their sin. Then at God’s word he made other tables on which the Law was rewritten by the divine finger, as God proclaimed Himself: “The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty” (Exodus 34:6-7). Thus does God base His mercy on the full execution of His justice, the principle of substitution necessarily lying in the background.
Then when the coming of the Substitute at last throws mercy’s door wide open to all, we hear no more: “Not clearing the guilty,” but: “Not imputing their trespasses unto them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). And so with David we can sing: “I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever” (Psalms 52:8).
God looks on man in mercy, with the emphasis on the infinite freeness of His own love, with man’s deep need in the foreview, stressing free and full deliverance from their misery in sin to all who are willing to have it. For He is “gracious and full of compassion; slow to anger and of great mercy” (Psalms 145:8). What a God we have!